RELATED CATEGORIES

Townlords

Sidney Pollard

Lords and Landlords: The Aristocracy and the Towns, 1774-1967 by David Cannadine
Leicester University Press, 494 pp, £19.00, July 1980, ISBN 0 7185 1152 2

The survival of aristocratic wealth and power into the late 19th and early 20th century, when their agricultural base had been in relative decline for over a century, is something that has puzzled numerous observers. Michael Thompson raised the question among economic historians nearly twenty years ago, and whole generations of political historians have offered alternative solutions. It is something which occurs, different in detail but similar in outline, in many other European countries, and it is a question well worth pursuing.